Worth Modifying Code to Have Text Appear Near Top
-
Our site uses Wordpress. The code is somewhat heavy. The text to code ratio for the home page is only 16%.
Our developer suggests that we modify the code so that the important text appears at the top of the page (without changing the design) so that Google can index it more easily. My developer feels this would be more beneficial for SEO. He believes that reducing the code would create HTML errors. The home page is www.nyc-officespace-leader.com
Is this approach sound?
My developer describes it in the following manner:
| Let me say that I don’t believe the text to code ratio has a significant impact on SEO per se but of course that reducing code, it will reduce page weight therefore it may help to improve ranking.
See Homepage for example, this is the top landing page of your site, therefore it is very relevant to optimize. You can see the first block, from attached it has very little content and too many code. There is almost nothing to do about it, visually that is a very good block, in terms of SEO it isn't. I do not recommend to take it off just for SEO, that will make all pages with lot of text, lack of images and people may go away.
On the other hand, most of the cases we want to improve text code ratio, there is an impact on unexpected BUGs because the code is being changed and this may affect functionality.
I would suggest to spend time on improve the sort-order of the important content inside the code, so we may have similar text code ratio at the end but the important code we need Google to index will be at the very top in the source code, in terms of a very technical approach Google will find the key content faster and that should help to improve the crawling process as search engines read HTML code linearly. This change do not necessarily will affect the HTML, we can achieve it by using style sheet (CSS code) instead, reducing the chance of major BUGs.
Either is our choice, we need to evaluate potential problems, code issues and content impact and also we need to apply changes and wait at least 3-4 weeks to start seeing results. It is a long task.
Let me know your thought about this, we will estimate a task to improve code without affect web design |
-
Hi,
Text > HTML ratio isn't actually a ranking factor and there is no penalty based on this. What you can do with it, is use it as an indicator on how big your pages are and identify those that might be slowing do the loading.
There is no test or correlation that would suggest that reducing this text > HTML ratio will do anything for your rankings.
You need to also try and get away from the thought process that SEO is just about search positions - you need to think about customer acquisitions and page usability as well. For example, if I look at your home page and you were to just add a block of text at the top, then this would reduce the effectiveness of the big messages and search availability at the top. it would push down the main search box and offer nothing of use that anyone would really want to read.
So no, don't add text to the top of the page as this isn't needed. If this were just one big picture with nothing at all there, then it might be a different discussion.
Are your search positions dropping at the moment, or is there a reason that this came about?
I have clients whose Text > HTML ratio is 6-8% and in 1st position for very highly sought after terms. There is a lot more at play.
-Andy
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Does data highlighter changes override the hard coded schema markup?
I hope one liner question explains what I'm looking for.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOEnthusiast0 -
Is my text readable? I don't see it in the page source
Text on my site seems to be readable in a text only version (the page is not cached so I viewed it by disabling JAVA and then copy and pasted the page into Word) However, when I look in the page source I don't see the text there. The text was created using Open X html boxes to help us with formatting, but is this causing an SEO problem?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | theLotter0 -
Novice Question - Can Browsers realistically distinguish words within concatenated strings e.g. text55fun or should one use text-55-fun? What about foreign languages especially more obscure ones like Finnish which Google Translate often miss-translates?
I am attempting to understand what is realistically possible within Google, Yahoo and Bing as they search websites for KeyWords. Technically my understanding is that they should be able to distinguish common words within concatenated strings, although there can be confusion between word boundaries when ambiguity is involved. So in the simple example of text55fun, do search engines actually distinguish text, 55 and fun separately? There are practical processing, databased and algorithm limitations that might turn a technically possible solution into a unrealistic one at a commercial scale. What about more ambiguous strings like stringsstrummingstrongly would that be parsed as string s strummings trongly or strings strummings trongly or strings strumming strongly? Does one need to use dashes or underscores to make it unambiguous to the search engine? My guess is that the engine would recognize the dash or space and better understand the word boundaries yet ignore the dash or underscore from an overall concatenated string perspective. Thanks in advance to whoever can provide any insight to an old coder who is new to this field.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ny600 -
Is it worth switching from .net to .com if you own both domain names
For over 20 years the company I work for has used www.company.net as their TLD, because we could not register www.company.com at that time. However, currently we also own www.company.com www.company.com has a 301 re-direct to www.company.net We are a global company, and market leader in our industry. Our company name is associated with the product we make, and our competitors use our company name as their targeted keywords to attract visitors to their sites because our company name is synonym with the product we and they make. As we are a global company we also have lots of TLDcc's. The email address of all our employees worldwide have a .net email address extension. Would you advice switching from www.company.net to www.company.com??? And if so, what would be the reasons for this switch. Would it only be for branding purposes? Looking forward to some insights before taking on such an invasive switch (because of the switch of all email addresses of employees worldwide). Best regards, Astrid Groeneveld
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cordstrap0 -
Could the top SEO's such as Rand enter any arena?
This is just a post for fun really. Do you think the top 3 SEO's in the world could be in the top 3 results of any industry in 6 months? I would love to see this in action really, a couple of guys against industry giants in insurance or something.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | activitysuper0 -
.htaccess code ?
What is the code to redirect www.xyz.com/abc where abc is a folder to www.xyz.com/abc.html
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoug_20050 -
Anchor text help
Hello, I am a small website designer in Mexico.. as you know it is hard to rank in these keywords My main competitors appear with (diseño web = web design) on google.com.mx Almost 80% of the anchor text from my links are (diseño web Mexico =web design Mexico) If I search (diseño web Mexico =web design) on google.com.mx I appear on first page. If I search (diseño web = web design) on google.com.mx I appear on page 3. My questions: Is this because my anchor text is diseño web Mexico? should i change it to (diseño web = web design)? Or is it because (diseño web = web design) is a harder key word to rank? this is my website http://bit.ly/eKyWvr Regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Pixelar0 -
Resources for how to code pages...
I'm looking for some nuts and bolts ideas about how to best layout the HTML code for a webpage. Can you point to some case studies? Perhaps you've done some testing yourself? This could be folded into the Tom Critchlow's question about what should be included in a updated developers SEO cheat sheet.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 19prince0